At this time of year, blueberry orchards should look like a winter wonderland. White flowers should cover the plants, ready to reveal their high-value fruit.
Instead, some orchards in the Waikato are brown. Those white flowers – totally dead.
“It looks like someone took a blowtorch to the place,” Dan Peach told 1News, standing in the middle of his seven-hectare orchard near Hamilton.
Last Friday, growers in this area woke to find a severe frost had frozen the flowers.
“We to minus 4.4 degrees Celsius,” said Peach. “We were below zero for seven hours.”
And that, he explained, is more than enough time to inflict massive damage.
Peach’s orchard has about 15,000 blueberry plants – about five hectares of the seven are exposed to the elements while the remaining two are inside tunnels that protect them.
He reckons up to 85% of his crop this year is gone and counts himself lucky that he still has produce to pick in the tunnels.
Others are not so fortunate.
Song Victorino Medeiros and her family bought her nearby orchard in 2019. It has just under 10,000 plants.
She recalls waking up the morning of the frost and feeling like crying.
“My heart just dropped,” she told 1News.
“We thought this would be our best year since we took over.”
Only a few weeks ago she was excitedly showing videos of flower-laden trees to family overseas.
“We were expecting a 50% increase on last year because of the amount of flowers,” she said.
Instead on some varieties she guesses about 80% is lost.
For others, everything is gone.
As she looks through her orchard for what had survived, she reckons the only thing that could have saved the berries were overhead sprinklers installed above the plants.
But it’s not something they can afford right now.
“That is a lot of money,” she said.
Tunnels that protected crops were also very pricey - she said up to $500,000 per hectare.
Dan Peach also packs many of the blueberries produced in the area and has organised meetings for all affected farmers – if anything to show each other that they are not alone.
The last frost he remembers that was this devastating was over two decades ago.
Meanwhile scientists are warning these kinds of severe weather events are only going to get more common due to climate change.
“We’re seeing more frosts, more storm events... droughts as well,” said Richard Newcomb of Plant and Food Research.
“While we’ve got that general warming of the climate it’s the severity of these events that is becoming a real problem for agriculture.”
Plant and Food Research, a Crown Research Institute, was implementing breeding programmes to develop new crops as well as new management tools to help growers.
“We can breed new varieties that are more resilient or have an expanded window of production to spread the risk of these events,” he said.
“In the longer term we can look at new variants that we can grow under these protected systems – indoors even.
But as it’s not known when the next devastating frost might be, it’s a race against the clock.
“There is a high level of urgency - we are moving as fast as we can.”
Back at the orchards near Hamilton, growers will see over the coming weeks what can be saved.
As other blueberry growing regions were not as badly affected, they say consumers shouldn't worry about a shortage of berries in the supermarket.
But Song Victorino Medeiros has one simple plea while they rebuild ahead of next year’s season.
“Support the local market - go buy blueberries.”
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